The autumn sees several exhibitions probing ideas about cross-genre creativity and inter-disciplinarity. At the Mori Art Museum is Roppongi Crossing with the decidedly upbeat subtitle "Future Beats in Japanese Contemporary Art'. Over at the Museum of Contemporary Art 'Space For Your Future' will open on October 27th. Both exhibitions push agendas about disrupting old categories and taxonomies between different art forms, and attempt, in their varying ways, to discover new coincidences, mutations and histories. This tendency of pushing genres together has been prevalent in Japanese exhibitions in the last few years, and indeed seems to underline much current discourse about contemporary Japanese art. To mention a few examples: Takashi Murakami's Superflat enterprise and its overt gesticulations towards subcultures, Noi Sawaragi's exhibition 'Ground Zero Japan' (Nihon Zero-nen) which included special effects creators and monster makers alongside 'artists', the show-room-like JAM Tokyo-London at Opera City, and ArtIt magazine's special editions on 'Collaboration' and 'Design'.
Interestingly for me, all of these moments have comfortably stayed within the confines of institutional sanctioned art spaces - museums or official art media. I think that there are many interesting ways to think about this tendency towards de-taxonimising - many are no doubt historical and linked to well rehearsed subjects around Japan and modernity. However, here I want simply to point out the disjuncture that I feel remains between the ambitions and contents of these exhibitions and their frame. In his book 'On Collecting Art and Culture' (2000) James Clifford analyses what he calls the modern-culture system. Objects are collected, classified and assigned specific values. The museum clearly plays an important role in this signifying process, inscribing things which enter it and assigning them cultural value.
What I always feel slightly uncomfortable with in these 'crossing' projects is the fact that their framing devices - the museum - remains largely unchanged, unaltered. The original taxonomising mechanism with its special architectures, modes of conduct, curatorial staff, know-how and legitimacy, doesn't let the 'crossing' really fly. Hence, very often, one is left with the distinct impression of having walked through a shopping mall, a catalogue. Are sanctioned art spaces the best places to attempt these kinds of mutation experiments? Can their codes loosen enough to allow for hybridising?
Perhaps platforms such as biennales actually provide more opportunity for these kinds of experiments - being essentially ephemeral and more consumerist. Not to mention that their lineage emerges from World Fairs and Expositions which remain frames precisely for generating 'crossings' and 'visions of the future'.
I also write this as someone who comes from two cultures, a hybrid, and somehow sense that it only works because no one dominant framing system exists or is imposed. Sometimes I adopt Japanese frames, at other times British ones. Similarly, perhaps the museum needs to allow other, very different codes and ways of operating in. And then, perhaps seeing the design collective Enlightenment next to artist Tatsuo Majima can begin to float off into strange places.
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